Jean de La Fontaine

As great poets go, La Fontaine was an exceptionally late bloomer. After early, failed starts towards a career, first in the church, then studying law in Paris, he returned at age 21 to his parental home in Chateau Thierry and spent the next 17 years working in his father's office, marrying unhappily, fathering a son, and starting to write plays and poems with only minor success.

At last, in 1659, now 38 years old, La Fontaine submitted a long poem, Adonis, to the attention of Nicholas Foucquet, France's wealthy Superintendent of Finance, and was invited into Foucquet's entourage. At 38, La Fontaine found himself in a glittering group of the most talented poets, dramatists, artists and intellectuals in France, most notably the young Moliére.

La Fontaine's whole poetic career was to be immensely affected by his connection to Foucquet over the following three years. Politically astute and immensely ambitious, the Superintendent aspired also to be a great patron of all the arts. When La Fontaine joined Foucquet's circle, the Superintendent had just begun to build his magnificent chateau, Vaux Le Vicomte, a building that combined architecture, interior decoration and landscape architecture with an elegance and conceptual unity that was radically new to French architecture. It was a masterpiece.

When the stunningly beautiful chateau and its geometric formal gardens were completed, only three years later, Foucquet held a grand dedicatory celebration, a fête galante. All the court was invited, most particularly the guest of honor, Louis XIV, then just turned 23. Foucquet had made a fatal mistake. Crowned at age 5, Louis had grown up under the virtual regency of Cardinal Mazarin. But now the Cardinal was dead and Louis was at last king in fact. He came with his retinue from Fontainebleau, a dozen or so miles away. The king was enraged. The effrontery! The chateau was more beautiful than any of Louis's drafty palaces. To acquire the funds to build such a place, Foucquet had obviously stolen funds from the national treasury, Louis's treasury. Three weeks later, Foucquet was under arrest for embezzlement. His trial would last three years.

In the end, the panel of judges proposed merely to banish Foucquet, but the king insisted on a much harsher sentence—not exile but life imprisonment. And, soon after, Foucquet's three designers, Le Notre, Le Brun and Le Vau, were commissioned to start refurbishing the shabby old royal hunting lodge at Versailles into something along the lines of Foucquet's little gem—but on an immensely magnified scale, one that would demonstrate the superior power of the monarch many times over.

In the aftermath of Foucquet's arrest, as the other members of the Superintendent's entourage gravitated to the king's patronage—Moliére's repertory group became the King's Players—La Fontaine had the bad judgment, or loyalty, to stick by his fallen patron. He wrote poems petitioning Louis to forgive Foucquet, but to no avail. In the process, the two men, the poet and the monarch, developed a lifelong antipathy for each other. La Fontaine soon found other patrons to support and protect him from the king's displeasure and in 1668, four years after Fouquet's interminable trial had ended, he published his first collection of fables. He was then 47.

La Fontaine's work was an immediate success. But though the volume was dedicated to the king's 7-year old son, the Dauphin, and though in his preface La Fontaine claimed simply to be putting Aesop's fables into rhymes to entertain and instruct the royal heir in moral wisdom, contemporary readers—including the king—recognized clearly that the fables satirized the king and the society he ruled.

In the fables the monarch was variously seen as King Lion, ferociously insistent on his lion's share; as a rutting bull who chases from his turf his rival for a heifer's favors and as a voracious crane sent by the god Jupiter to rule over the complaining frogs, who had foolishly demanded a better king than the do-nothing log he had originally given them for a monarch.

La Fontaine's weapon against the king was ironic laughter. Luckily, Louis XIV was no Stalin and La Fontaine survived and wrote. By 1695, the last year of the poet's life, he had published two hundred and thirty eight fables, hardly any of them tales of his own invention. Like Shakespeare, though on a miniature scale, La Fontaine transformed prosaic old materials into living poetry. Borrowing not only from Aesop but, in later fables, from Hindu and Persian sources, he constructed a vision of the human comedy that is universal and timeless.